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Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

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Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#71

Jesus Christ…does this guy not know that you should keep quiet when you’re the subject of a criminal investigation from multiple government agencies?

This is further evidence that he was thinking of this in terms of all-or-nothing coin flips. In case you haven't seen it: COWEN: Okay, but let’s say there’s a game: 51 percent, you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears. Would you play that game? And would you keep on playing that, double or nothing? BANKMAN-FRIED: With one caveat. Let me give the caveat first, just to be a party pooper, w…

I've mistrusted SBF since this interview.

I was quite frankly shocked that I didn't see more people questioning his judgement/ethics after this and other strange statements

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#72

A programmer who helped create Tornado Cash rots in a Dutch jail cell (not charged, might I add) while SBF, Do Kwan, Elizabeth Holmes, and Trevor Milton still remain free. SBF is actually in a $30 million penthouse playing League of Legends. Clown world

Holmes is getting sentenced this week. It took years to get there. This isn't going to happen overnight.

[deleted]

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#73
post #5

SBF is monumentally stupid for sending these messages. Straight up admitting that any "ethics" was for reputation only. And not only that, but saying that the mistake was not doubling down again.

I wonder if it's an attempt to disassociate himself with EA. The general consensus on EA forums is anger and shame at how generally good ideas like treating charitable donations as an investment based on impact have been essentially hijacked and longtermism pushed front and center too.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#74
Well there's a sense of contrition there, so that's good.

However there's no reasonable excuse. You can't be like "aw man, I wish we'd been more organized". A big piece of this is on the investors. All those depositors would have been saying "Hey Sequoia and OTPP are in there, they must have checked things are sound". Was that foolish of them, to assume reputable investors had done their due diligence? You're between a rock and a hard place when you answer this. Either they should have all done their own DD, basically not invested because who can do DD as a little guy, or large investors are not responsible for what everyone else thinks they did, which is a rather major indictment of how our financial system works.

But back to SBF's explanation. It's just juvenile, basically the same as "mommy, you didn't make me clean my room and now I slipped and hurt myself". Whatever the laws are, when someone trusts you with their money, you are responsible for certain basic things like knowing where that money is. All the money in the world and they didn't think to hire an accountant and a risk manager. Or perhaps they did and those people quietly left, we'll never know.

About the regulators, it's quite the about-turn. He goes from saying it's a good thing (which was why CZ got pissed at him?) to saying it was just PR, and that regs basically don't work anywhere. I think this is also a juvenile view. You can make the case that it often leads to unintended consequences, and that it often causes problems, but you can't sweep all regulations in all sectors into the bin, there's just too much evidence that it sometimes does work. In fact you could say that the very reinvention of finance as crypto ought to motivate participants to look at what problems were found in the financial world that were addressed by regulation. Glass-Steagal, deposit insurance, central banking, there's a lot to read about.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd rather have an FTX scandal than Tornado Cash. I'd rather someone does some fraud than actual funneling of money to terrorists, druglords, gangs, and other problematic organizations.

So can we expect also arrest of people from Binance, who were helping to bypass sanctions for Iran? https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/exclusive-crypto-ex...

Whenever they stray into US or an ally's jurisdiction, I'd imagine.

I suspect they're smart enough not to.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#76

SBF, his foundation and his family are well connected politically. NYT already did a bizarro puff piece on him, now Vox does this (which apparently directly received FTX foundation money). It’s absurd as he is essentially a well connected criminal. edit I do want to correct one thing - this is not a puff piece like the NYT one, actually it implicates him.

Having two professors as parents isn't exactly 'well connected politically'[1]. Two senators, or two billionaires would be.

[1] I can't say I've ever felt that I was well-connected politically...

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#77

> I was trying to make sense of what, behind the PR and the charitable donations and the lobbying, Bankman-Fried actually believes about what’s right and what’s wrong — and especially the ethics of what he did and the industry he worked in. This seems like a weird thing to worry about right now, I imagine my question would be "hey, where'd all the deposits go?" Like, I'm sure it's all interesting in a psychological a…

It makes a lot of sense given the nature of SBF’s charitable donations and the purported rationale(s) behind them. Kelsey Piper is pretty deeply associated with the EA movement, which is heavily interested in picking the right ways to deploy money to solve the world’s problems, and much of SBF’s charitable giving was too.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#78
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tornado Cash is private banking. The writer of the code did nothing wrong by writing it.

Open source code should be considered protected speech. The fact that it’s not should scare the daylights out of any OSS contributor. Also, privacy should be a human right. If you disagree with the above, you might be a fascist.

It's protected speech. What you do with it can be criminal.

Code for an Arduino that moves a robotic arm is legal. Using it to pull a trigger and kill someone isn't.

Re: Sam Bankman-Fried tries to explain himself

#80
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is further evidence that he was thinking of this in terms of all-or-nothing coin flips. In case you haven't seen it: COWEN: Okay, but let’s say there’s a game: 51 percent, you double the Earth out somewhere else; 49 percent, it all disappears. Would you play that game? And would you keep on playing that, double or nothing? BANKMAN-FRIED: With one caveat. Let me give the caveat first, just to be a party pooper, w…

>COWEN: Then you keep on playing the game. So, what’s the chance we’re left with anything? Don’t I just St. Petersburg paradox you into nonexistence? >BANKMAN-FRIED: Well, not necessarily. Maybe you St. Petersburg paradox into an enormously valuable existence. That’s the other option. This logic is literally "You either win the lotto or you don't, 50/50 chance"

Not quite. The question is defined in a way that the EV of bet is positive, even though repeatedly doing it gets you an arbitrarily high chance of (moral) bankruptcy.

The original thing being referenced is St. Petersburg lottery, and each round of that is 50/50: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._Petersburg_paradox

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